We’ve activated syncing for the Sonoma Heritage Collections to display in OCLC‘s WorldCat and in WorldCat.org, the web-accessible catalog. OCLC’s Digital Collections Gateway does the heavy lifting of harvesting our records and converting them to minimal level MARC records based on the Dublin Core mapping in CONTENTdm. Although the level of detail is much less rich than within CONTENTdm, WorldCat displays the important information, and better yet, a thumbnail image that links to the Heritage Collections, as in this example:

Donald Drury was born in London and worked with his father and grandfather in their stained glass firm in London after World War II until emigrating to the United States in 1957. He worked throughout the San Francisco Bay area for the next decade and half before taking an MA in classical languages from UC Berkeley; he subsequently became head librarian at Menlo College in Menlo Park, Calif. Drury designed the

On the to-do list: We need to created the collection level records for the Gateway that will also be harvested and linked from the records and as we add more records, we’ll need to sync again for them to make them visible.

Initially, we had hoped to use these records to create brief records in Horizon, our local system, for the purpose of inventory control for physical items linked to the digital images and to point to the CONTENTdm images from the catalog, but mapping via the Gateway is too limited and linking with existing WorldCat records too difficult. We’re instead exporting metadata from CONTENTdm locally and converting it to MARC records to add to WorldCat ourselves, then exported to Horizon. We uploaded the first batch today, with many more to come. The result is slightly funky, but does the job.